Grace and Merit

Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time C-2

Entrance Antiphon Cf. Est 4:17 Within your will, O Lord, all things are established, and there is none that can resist your will. For you have made all things, the heaven and the earth, and all that is held within the circle of heaven; you are the Lord of all.

Collect Almighty ever‑living God, who in the abundance of your kindness surpass the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever

Scripture today: Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2: 2-4; Psalm 94; 2 Timothy 1:6-8.13-14; Luke 17:5-10

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith." The Lord replied, "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. "Who among you would say to your servant who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here immediately and take your place at table'? Would he not rather say to him, 'Prepare something for me to eat. Put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink. You may eat and drink when I am finished'? Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded? So should it be with you. When you have done all you have been commanded, say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.'" (Luke 17:5-10)

Grace and Merit In today’s second reading (2 Timothy 1:6-8.13-14), St Paul refers to God’s gift to Timothy. “I am reminding you”, he writes to Timothy, “to fan into a flame the gift that God gave you.” He then speaks more of the gift. He exhorts Timothy to bear the hardships of his vocation, “relying on the power of God.” Then at the end of the passage he tells Timothy to guard the teaching "with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us." Timothy, then, is to enliven the gift of God by relying on the power of God and the help of the Holy Spirit. That is to say, he is to rely on the grace of God. Our being made right in the sight of God, our salvation and our sanctification, the fulfilment of our calling from God, all depend on God’s gift of grace. In our Gospel passage (Luke 17:5-10), the apostles ask our Lord to “Increase our faith.” This gift of an increase of faith is a gift of God’s grace. At the moment of the Incarnation, the Angel addressed Mary as one who was full of grace. Her habitual state was that of being full of grace. Grace is our need and our glory. It is God’s redeeming and sanctifying favour, and it makes us new. It is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it. In the first instance, it is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in baptism, and is the source of our ongoing sanctification. It disposes the soul to live habitually with God and to act by his love. It is also the source of particular helps by God to assist the soul to progress towards him, beyond the grace of an habitual share in his life. These further graces answer to particular spiritual needs of our actual situation. When we ask for the grace of God, as we should do repeatedly, we are asking for God’s abiding favour as well as the special sanctifying helps that arise from this habitual share in his life. When the apostles asked our Lord to increase their faith, they were asking for his help for a special spiritual need. They sought the actual grace of light and prayer. At Pentecost, the grace of God came granting them an habitual share in his life, and the actual graces empowering them to believe and bear witness to him.

When we live habitually in the state of grace, this grace places us in habitual communion with God. In terms of its effect, this habitual grace sanctifies us, and in this sense is called sanctifying grace. It is an habitual action of God, at work in our Baptism and in the various Sacraments, maintaining us in this filial relationship with him. It also opens us to the many actual graces that God gives us in the course of our path of growing communion with him. Grace, whether habitual or actual, is first and foremost the gift of the Holy Spirit who justifies and sanctifies us in an ongoing sense and by particular interventions. God’s favour or grace also includes the gifts that the Spirit grants to associate us with his work. This grace accompanies us in our work and makes it fruitful. Various graces of state enable us to exercise our responsibilities. So we should pray for all the graces we need. We ought pray that God will preserve us in the state of grace; that he will grant us abundant actual graces so that we may grow in his friendship; that he will grant us all the graces we need to fulfil our duties; in a word, we ought pray for all the grace we need both now and at the hour of our death. The Hail Mary is a beautiful prayer because in it we invoke the intercession of the mother of Christ for all our needs now and at the hour of our death. It has been said that the work of personal sanctity depends 99% on the grace of God and 1% on our own efforts. But that 1% constitutes everything we have, our entire effort of cooperating with the grace of God. We will even need God’s grace to put in that 1% that is our own. If we put in that effort every day, we will merit eternal life, and this will be due to the goodness and grace of God. It is something which, by his grace, we will merit. The saints go to God with great merits, all due to God’s grace. For this reason our Lord said that to the one who has will be given more, and the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away from him. So we must ask God for his grace, and then by our active and generous cooperation with that help he gives, merit by our divinely-supported efforts his further friendship.

Let us then take up and pursue the work of our sanctification and the work of the apostolate, constantly asking for God’s grace to do it. A good grace to ask for would be that which the disciples asked for in our Gospel passage today: "Increase our faith" (Luke 17:5).

(E.J.Tyler)

Further reading: The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1996-2016 (Grace and merit)

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A Second Reflection on the readings of the Twenty seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time C-2:

Scripture today: Habakkuk 1:2-3.2:2-4; Psalm 94; 2 Tim 1:6-8.13-14; Luke 17:5-10

Faith The upright man, God tells us in the first reading, lives by his faith (Habakkuk 1:2-3.2:2-4). That is a key to how to live: by faith. The prophet’s message was, in summary, that whatever evils might strike, the person of faith will emerge victorious. St John in one of his Letters writes that this is the victory over the world, our faith. It is often said that the evils of the world are the obstacle to belief in God. But the scriptures tell us that belief in God gives us the victory over the world. This faith in God involves faith in One who is almighty, and so to believe in God is to believe also in his power. It is so often this which we do not believe. We do not really believe that God is all-powerful. We tend to think, without admitting it, that God is just one powerful reality among many, and that, therefore, there is a limit to his power, which is to say, a limit to the degree to which we can depend on him alone. Ultimately we tend not to be very different from those who believed in many gods, none of whom were all-powerful. There is also this. A real reliance on God’s power is crucial to the spiritual and apostolic life, for notice what St Paul says in the second reading: “So you are never to be ashamed of witnessing to the Lord, but with me bear the hardships for the sake of the Gospel, relying on the power of God” (2 Timothy 1:6-8.13-14). Relying on the power of God, having faith in God who is all-powerful, enables us to bear the hardships involved in living the Christian life and bearing witness to the Lord. We are all called to be holy, to be saints, full of love in the sight of God. It is our faith that is the foundation of this programme. It gives us the victory. All this enables us to appreciate the request of the apostles in the Gospel (Luke 17:5-10). “Increase our faith,” they said to our Lord.

Our Lord immediately takes advantage of the request of his disciples to stress the power of faith: it can move mountains, the real mountains which are unbelief and sin. Our Lord puts his point in figurative language: “Were your faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” Can we imagine uprooting a tree by a word and having it plant itself in the sea, of all places? Of course our Lord was making his point with colourful and figurative hyperbole. He was saying that if we have a strong faith in almighty God, God’s will, which might seem impossible, will be seen to be very possible. And what is the will of God? This is the will of God, St Paul says in one of his Letters, your sanctification. That is the real mountain. That is the miracle God wants to work, and every day he himself is at that work by his grace, but he asks our cooperation. Fundamental to our cooperation is having a true faith in him. We must believe in him as we set out each day to do his will, which is to act in mind, in heart, in word and in deed in such a way as to please him. On one occasion our Lord was asked to work a miracle. He responded, “unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe!” And the person replied, “Lord, I do believe, but help my unbelief!” Our Lord wants us to believe on the authority of his word as it comes to us in the teaching, the preaching and the ministry of his Church. St John tells us at the end of his Gospel how Thomas, when he saw the risen Christ and felt his wounds, said, My Lord and My God! Our Lord replied, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” We will, then, be blessed if we believe even if we have not seen the miracles and supportive evidence of our Lord’s power. And the supreme blessing will be our sanctification.

Each one of us has been called to be holy and full of love in God’s sight. This is our work in life, but above all it is God’s work, the work of his love and his power. In this work and power of God we must have faith. Our faith will lead us to the Sacraments, to Mass, to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, to frequent Confession, to a constantly docile and receptive attitude to the Church’s teaching and guidance, to trust in God when it becomes difficult to keep his commandments. Our faith gives us the victory. “Lord I do believe. Help my unbelief!” Let us then pray for a deep faith and for grace to live by it.

(E.J.Tyler)

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